This is a blog detailing the creation/evolution/ID controversy and assorted palaeontological news. I will post news here with running commentary.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

BioLogos, Ken Ham and David Menton—A Response, Part I

I thought that I would respond to Ken Ham's veiled attack on my BioLogos series and subsequent referral to the post on human origins by David Menton in one lump post but it is becoming too massive and straggly and it is taking too long, so I will respond to it in a series of posts, starting with this one. Here goes:

BioLogos is at it again! Earlier this week,
I wrote about how they’re indoctrinating children, teens, and young
adults with theistic evolution. But now they’re running (for the second
time) a blog series on the supposed evidence for human evolution!Now,
evolutionists have claimed for decades that humans evolved from an
ape-like ancestor over long ages. But the so-called evidence they’ve
produced for their idea doesn’t support it at all. In fact, many of the
alleged fossils of “missing links” have turned out to be hoaxes, and
many others are easily identified as either fully human or fully ape.

Really? I can only think of one hoax in the last hundred years, Piltdown, and that was uncovered by scientists, using scientific methods, in 1953. He continues:

Let's
follow the link and see how we create “ape-men.” He begins his post by
laying out Biblical Starting Assumptions and Evolutionary Starting
Assumptions. The hermeneutic validity of AiG's (and by extension, the
young earth creationist) doggedly literalist position has been been
addressed by thousands of writers over the course of the last two
thousand years and will not be addressed in-depth here. I will, instead, address his points regarding human evolution.

Point 1. He writes:

Since
evolutionists generally do not believe that man evolved from any ape
that is now living, they look to fossils of humans and apes to provide
them with their desired evidence. Specifically, they look for any
anatomical feature that looks “intermediate” (between that of apes and
man). Fossil apes having such features are declared to be ancestral to
man (or at least collateral relatives) and are called hominids. Living
apes, on the other hand, are not considered to be hominids, but rather
are called hominoids because they are only similar to humans but did not
evolve into them. Nonetheless, evolutionists are willing to accept mere
similarities between the fossilized bones of extinct apes and the bones
of living men as “proof ” of our ape ancestry.

First,
the wording is such that it gives the impression that the fossils we
find and the characteristics that we identify as transitional are those
that we desire to. What we want is immaterial. Our understanding of
human evolution has changed as we have uncovered new evidence. This
process has often been messy and straggly. If we tailored the fossil
record to fit our evolutionary preconceptions, it would not look
anything like what it does. We don't look for features that are
"intermediate." We look for traits that are derived in a particular
direction and differentiate them from traits that are retained. In this
way, we can identify lineages based on shared derived traits and
identify splits in the fossil record between lineages. As was recently
written over on Panda's Thumb, taxonomists cannot identify
ancestor-descendent relationships. It is not possible to do so given
our understanding of the fossil record and taxonomy. What we can do,
and do quite well, however, is identify related taxa and place them in
taxonomic relationship to each other. That is how we have identified
Ardipithecus and differentiated it from other late Miocene apes.
Whether or not Ardipithecus is on the line that led to humans or not is
not known. What is known is that it had traits derived in the hominin
line (shortened canines, facultative bipedality) while still maintaining
a large number of retained traits linking it to other Miocene apes
(long arms relative to legs, adaptations to arboreality, a small
ape-like brain-case).

Point 2:

Though
many similarities may be cited between living apes and humans, the only
historical evidence that could support the ape ancestry of man must
come from fossils. Approximately 95 percent of all known fossils are
marine invertebrates, about 4.7 percent are algae and plants, about 0.2
percent are insects and other invertebrates, and only about 0.1 percent
are vertebrates (animals with bones). Finally, only the smallest
imaginable fraction of vertebrate fossils consists of primates (humans,
apes, monkeys, and lemurs).

What is meant by
the “smallest imaginable fraction?” If you have a sample size of five
hundred, 0.01% would be 5. That is not much to go on. On the other
hand, if your sample size is huge, say on the order of hundreds of
billions of fossils, which reflects the best estimates, then 0.01%
would still be over one billion fossils. Even if only a fraction of that,
0.01%, related to human origins, we would still have over a million fossils relating. Recently, Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz put together a
four-volume encyclopedia set of human fossil remains. Each volume is at
least 400 pages. There are a total of 149
listed, many of which have multiple individuals represented. And this
represents only the most complete sites. In 1977, Kenneth Oakley published,
in four volumes, the Catalog of Fossil Hominids, a listing of every
fossil site known to that point. There are literally hundreds of sites
listed.

Is it true that we have gaps in our understanding of human evolution because our fossil record is incomplete? Yes, it is, but what we have is a whole lot better than Menton suggests. The site of Hadar alone, which is where the Australopithecus afarensis find Lucy was discovered, yielded over 250 hominin fossils alone in the 1970s. Many more have been found since. Menton makes a blanket assumption that, since we have only a fraction of the total fossil record, that is not much. Here, he is mistaken.

You may be interested in my comments here about how another YEC apologetics site - CMI - tried to portray the Christians at Biologos as dishonest (by lying about radioactive isotopes to make them look 'incorrect' or 'making false statements) when they were merely being brief):http://www.godofevolution.com/another-meme-about-the-most-interesting-god-in-the-world/#disqus_thread

Unsurprisingly when I emailed Tas Walker about the misleading claims by CMI in that 2012 article I received no response.

I am sorry. I did not respond immediately. I have severe problems with CMI. That is from where Carl Weiland works, and I commented (or tried) to on one of his pages that was just one lie or half-truth after another. It is here I think I ended with something to the effect of "that is why scientists despise dealing with young earth creationists."